The aim of this thesis was to study how conversations change when they are translated for subtitles. The idea was to find out what kinds of changes occur especially in the structure of conversations and what translation strategies are used to cause the changes. The research material consisted of seven conversations from the first episode of the British television series Sherlock. The translations were from two different versions of Finnish subtitles. The chosen conversations were essential for the plot, because in them Sherlock presents the observations he made and supports his conclusions with argumentation. The conversations were divided into three phases. The first phase starts the conversation and leads to the argumentation, the middle phase encompasses the argumentation and the third phase leads away from the argumentation. The theory portion of the study covered three different areas that were utilised in analysing the translated conversations: the characteristic elements of subtitling as a form of translation, translation strategies and illocutionary acts. The conception of the constraints and conventions of subtitling helped in understanding the situation in which the conversations were translated. The translation strategies that were chosen for this study were Chesterman’s (1997) pragmatic strategies, because they were thought to be the most useful ones in translating conversations. The concept of illocutionary point from speech act theory was used to ascertain the functions that key utterances for the conversations’ structure played in the conversations.
The translated conversations were analysed in terms of their different phases and the key utterances within the phases, but also in terms of other aspects. The analysis of the different phases revealed the following findings: The structurally significant conversation initiating utterance was always a directive, which was translated in the majority of cases. The utterance that initiated the argumentation phase was also always a directive, but it was omitted in about a third of the cases. Argumentation retained its structure during translation, but its coherence suffered due to the omission of connectives. Rebuttals of Sherlock’s conclusions were translated every time they occurred, but directives asking for further argumentation were sometimes omitted. The utterances in the ending phases of the conversations that referred back to the argumentation were translated every time. There were also findings relating to changes outside the structure of the conversations: Omissions lead to the lessening of coherence in the translated conversations. Moreover, the way in which the characters on screen appeared to the viewer as well as how the relationships between the characters were manifested were subject to changes when the conversations were translated. The two most actively used translation strategies that emerged were information change, which caused changes in the structure, coherence and interpersonal aspects of the conversations, and illocutionary change, which changed the form of key utterances but retained their function in the conversations. Omissions, which were mainly the result of the temporal and spatial constraints of subtitles, were the dominant contributor in the changes the conversations underwent. Some of the pragmatic translation strategies proved to be inapplicable for subtitling, because they were originally intended for literary translation.